Blood and Sand

ecently
I wrote about City Streets, shown at the National Film Theatre as part of a
season of films directed by Rouben
Mamoulian.
Yesterday evening I saw Blood and Sand, also directed by Rouben
Mamoulian. The novel by Vicente Biasco
Ibáñez
had previously been famously filmed in 1922 with Rudolph Valentino: Mamoulian's
version was made in 1941 with the advantage of
Technicolor.

Though I have seen the
1922 version it was many years ago and I don't really remember anything much
about it: the 1941 version is, to be frank, overheated tosh, though the actors
do everything they can to hold it together: Tyrone Power as the arrogant
up-and-coming bullfighter, Linda Darnell as his long-suffering wife, and Rita
Hayworth in fine smouldering form as the femme fatale who distracts him from his
wife - and the bulls, with fatal
consequences.

Mamoulian's direction is
intelligent and presents the story in the best possible light, and he was
magnificently served by the cinematographers, Ernest Palmer and Ray Rennahan,
who won the Academy Award for best photography: the lighting and use of colour
is deliberately in the style of the great Spanish painters such as Murillo and
Velzquez and the result looks stunning - more so in the print shown (which I
assume to be a digital restoration) than would have been possible at the time
with the original dye-layer prints which tended to fuzziness.

It's worth adding a technical note:
early Technicolor relied upon filming through red, green and blue filters to
produce three monochrome films which were used to make the colour print using a
non-photographuic dye process. Unlike more recent colour negative systems, the
original negatives don't fade if kept properly: but they do tend to shrink
unevenly, upsetting the registration of the three colours. Digital restoration
involves scanning the three separation negatives, and then applying software to
every frame to undeo the effects of the shrinkage and produce rock-steady
colours. The steadiness of the image was what made me assume this was a digital
restoration and not just a new print from the negatives. It would have been
interesting to see it digitally projected - I've seen excerpts from
Casablanca (monochrome, of course), The Adventures of Robin Hood
and Gone With The Wind projected using a 'DLP' digital projector from a
digital copy of the scan of the camera negative (so no film process is involved
other than the very original) with quite extraordinary results.